The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [73]
– The fence makes you think of all this?
– Yes, said Jean.
– What I worry about, said the Caveman, is whether all those bison will confuse the squirrels.
The Caveman, Lucjan, lived in a building that had been marooned. Over time, the tumbledown coach house had been cut off from the rest of the property and stood stranded behind other houses and without an entrance on the street. Nevertheless, it had its own parenthesized address: (rear). It was surrounded on three sides by residential backyards and on the remaining side by an apartment building. Two days after their meeting in the park, Jean followed the narrow path that led from Amelia Street, accepting Lucjan's invitation to tea. She hesitated at his gate. The trees were thick with leaves of every shade of yellow, the sun illuminating the coach house like a cottage in the middle of a wood. She felt that if she turned around, she would see the city street retreating from her, like the shore from a ship, and she wished Avery were with her. She felt the lurch of banishment, for the first time feeling he had already forgotten her. The swaying leaves, captured sun, moved continuously in and out of shadow, a woven disquiet; this seemed to Jean to be as sad as the first waking instant of consciousness, sad as the single continuously disappearing moment that is a life. Sad as a hope suffocating in a collector's jar, too few holes pounded into the tin lid.
Inside, Jean discovered, Lucjan's little building had been renovated, piecemeal, over many years. It contained only half of a second storey that might, fashionably, be called a loft, though in truth it was half a floor, reached by a steep staircase. This is where Lucjan slept. He had painted an oriental carpet in the centre of this room on the bare planks – two weeks of work. The ground floor was a single large room, a kitchen against one wall, with an old, elegant claw-footed bathtub in the corner. The tub had remained because of the pipes and, besides, had been simply too heavy to move. At night, with a fire, Lucjan soaked and listened to music, which filled the open space like a cathedral. He'd cut and sanded a board and placed it across the tub whenever he needed an extra table.
Lucjan used the other half of the ground floor as his studio.
Every surface of the kitchen was bright white – sparse and clean. But the other half of the large room, the half used for work, was piled with sculptors' tools, scrap metal, pieces of wood, old cabinets, driftwood, lumber, canvas, broken furniture. Lucjan followed Jean's gaze.
– My friend Paweł says, ‘Don't think clean and dirty, think conscious mind and unconscious.’
Jean sat quietly in Lucjan's kitchen while he searched for a drawing. She had noticed small stones here and there, on the tables and the low shelf beside the bed, and now she noticed the books, on the kitchen counter, on the floor, gaping in varying degrees, and realized Lucjan used these round stones as bookmarks, to prop open his place.
Jean carried their cups to the sink and rinsed them. Then she crossed the room and picked up the toy train she'd glimpsed on the windowsill. The silver paint was scratched but still bright; and she saw, on the side of the engine, a swastika and the double lightning insignia of the ss. Immediately Jean put it down. She stood very still. From across the room, Lucjan watched her.
He looked at her and suddenly she felt a great fear.
– I'm sorry, said Jean. I think I should go.
– Then go, he said.
Jean put on her coat and scarf and stood at the door.
– Do you think I'm a simpleton? he asked.
She opened the door.
– That engine, said Lucjan, I've had it since I was a boy. I loved that train, it was my first real toy, something store-bought, not home-made, not carved out of an old table leg or stuffed and sewn from scraps. It came from Piotrowski's on Krakowskie Przedmieście, plucked right from the shop window. My stepfather and I saw it